that I haven't seen addressed. What are the ramifications of downloading an episode of a TV series that has already been broadcast. I've paid my cable bill and would therefore, I think, have the right to view the program. If my VCR timer fritzes and I want to pick up a copy of an episode of Lost or 24, what are the legalities? Would it matter whether the commercials were included (which I would edit out regardless of whether I recorded it or someone else did)?
how many of those e-mail are truly spam (i.e. - blanket unsolicited e-mails) versus how many are "solicited" on Mr. Gates' behalf by others trying to avoid user identification (or just trying to make his life less convenient.) I wouldn't really qualify the latter as spam.
This option makes a lot more sense to me. No likelihood of glowing children, and, despite the suggestion of flooding the dessert, could be easily decentralized around the country to make it harder to take out by terrorists.
I do wonder how making the middle east irrelevant would affect world politics. Think it would be a good idea to do BEFORE their nuclear weapons programs come to full fruition.
Getting people to buy e-book readers when there are only a limited number of titles seems to be one of the most frequently memtioned stumbling blocks. From a corporate perspective, I think e-TEXTBOOKS might be the best way to create this market.
Students: 1) are usually more willing to try new technology, 2) have better eyes and are less likely to complain while current graphics capabilities improve (how many times did your Mom insist you needed more light to read by when you were perfectly comfortable), 3) are in a sufficiently controlled environment that the DRM issues could be addressed, and 4) frequently need texts which are in the public domain (at least English and History students.)
Once the paradigm becomes familiar to a significant market segment, it will naturally expand to other areas of the literary economy.
Back when I was working for a regional stock brokerage in Atlanta in the early- to mid-90's, I always recommended the various popular computer magazines to the brokers as a leading indicator of the news that would be making its way into the mainstream press within the next month. At that point just about any positive widely released press coverage would cause a jump in a tech stock. It was interesting to watch the progression of "news" stories about technologies and firms as they went from press release to periodical to general news outlet, and how they would affect stock prices (in the short term). We got pretty good at figuring out which articles had the pizzazz to make the transition. Some of the brokers made a good bit of money at a time when fundamentals weren't particularly good predictors just based on this news life-cycle.
Picking through the chicken little ranting, there was one little gem.
To paraphrase: the protectionist act of preventing foreign technology workers from coming to the US has led to the distribution of technical knowledge throughout the world to a much greater extent than would have occurred if emigration had been allowed/encouraged.
That concept deserves a lot more investigation. Whether it would have been better or worse, I wouldn't say without a lot more consideration. Redistributing wealth is a natural side effect of the advancement of any scale of economy, be it local, national or global. The lesson, though, seems to be that fighting the economics of the situation wound up creating exactly the result most feared; lost American jobs and capital.
What about essential professional apps that aren't office productivity related? I'll use Architecture as an example, since I am most familiar with it. But I'm sure there are many other professional level applications that could serve equally well in this context.
Apparently it's going to be a good while before any of the standard CAD programs are ported to Linux. I know that CGI shops use custom programs for rendering and modeling on vast farms of Linux machines, so Linux must be up to the challenge.
Architects and engineers have to be able to send files around to collaborators at other firms, who must then be able to manipulate the original files (add plumbing systems to buildings, etc.) So compatibility with the software being run on Windows systems(and to a lesser extent Macs) is essential. Furthermore, in my experience the learning curve to gain proficiency in one of the major design tools is particularly steep relative to other programs, so re-training reasonably highly-paid users is an expesive proposition, which makes being able to run well-known, industry- standard programs is even more important.
Is there a critical mass of users needed to encourage the consideration of particular software by those of you writing emulators? Is there even awareness of the potential market for such products? (These are users who regularly spend $2,000 - $5,000 per seat for the priviledge of running specific programs, if that helps the financial end of the argument. They'll pay for software.) Do the intense video requirements of these programs just make them more difficult to run in emulation? Do firms like Autodesk and Graphisoft (who are particularly paranoid about piracy, due to the "high-margin/low-volume" nature of the market for professional CAD software) go out of their way to discourage interoperability? Is there something I'm missing?
The idea that consumers are clamoring for HDTV seems fallacious. I've seen it, and agree that it's a better picture, etc. I've heard symphony orchestras in great concert halls, and they sound better than any recording possibly could. You know what, though? I still enjoy listening to classical music in the car with the windows rolled down on the stock speakers in my car. It would never occur to me not to listen to the music in an acceptable format just because I know that somewhere, someone was having a higher fidelity experience. I'd get much more pleasure out of season symphony tickets for my wife and myself than spending the same amount on my home stereo or television.
Why is it necessary to mandate a format change? (I'm going to make up a term here, so credit me if you use it.) It's "push-through" economics. The basic premise is, "The invisible hand must be wrong since it's not leading the people where I want them to go. I must cut that hand off at the wrist, and strong arm the people back on the path I prefer."
I've been working at a center for assistive technology for about 2 years now, and one of the things that caught me off guard was that people with visual disabilities who use screen readers speed them up, frequently from 4x to 6x the speed of normal speech. It can sound a little like insects buzzing, depending on your setup.
It was startling because they usually demonstrate the technology at about 1x to people who won't be using it regularly. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense, I had just never thought about it. It was one of the things I'd always dreaded about sight-loss: how limiting it would be to have to access information at speech speed rather than reading speed.
What the RIAA wants more than anything is for 12-year-olds to get the message the they are breaking the law and that someone could come down on them hard. This is exactly the kind of case that they hope to push to the forefront of the issue. They're not interested in a 12-year-old girl who's very sorry and didn't realize that what she was doing was illegal. They're interested in 5 million other 12-year-old girls being too scared to download music in the first place because they've heard the stories of the girl whose parents had to send their entire life savings to record executives because she downloaded a couple of tracks and then Christmas didn't come to her house ever again and nobody got to go to college and there was no milk for the baby and the girl was sent away to juvenile hall where she was made to do her homework and clean enormous bathrooms 16 hours every day . . .
I use Evolution for e-mail in Linux and Opera for browsing. (I use Opera for both under W2K.) Haven't had a major problem with either in quite some time. Haven't tried the opera mail client under Linux. They've only added it recently, and to be honest, I'm happy enough with Evolution I haven't really been tempted to cheat on it.
Am I the only one who thinks that congress has a lot of more important issues they should be spending their time on than legislation revolving around entertainment. There are an awful lot of health and human dignity areas that would benefit from the time and money we're wasting on deciding whether a studio is being adequately compensated for a digitally perfect copy of a third rate movie.
What I don't understand is how corporations are allowed to give so much soft money TO BOTH SIDES!?!
It's pretty obvious that they aren't trying to further a political agenda (which I could see arguments for and against.) They're just making sure that whoever wins owes them a favor. They aren't making any pretense that their donations are anything more than bribery. I don't see where this would even be a grey area in the whole campaign finance reform issue.
Ximian Desktop only just came out for Mandrake 8.1 today . . . about 3 months after originally promised.
I know my father eventually got fed up with trying to keep up with all the upgrade cycles and just decided to get a stable system that he understood thoroughly that did what he needed (medical database programming) and stop worrying about upgrading. I think it was an SCO Unix (pre-Open Desktop) on a 486-66 with a half a gig of HD space and maybe 64MB memory. He always seemed to have a look of contentment on his face after that. I'm beginning to think that was a sign of maturity and sanity, rather than senility.
Trying to be a cutting-edge contrarian without really understanding the issues, and so looks foolish: a look he's apparently comfortable with.
Steve Jobs is actually cutting edge and, when appropriate, contrarian, and so has been having an effect on the computer world for twenty years, just not the effect Katz seems to value. How much of what he has done has filtered down into the computing mainstream. Ignoring the most obvious older examples, the popularization of the desktop metaphor, the introduction of the mouse, how many other design advances has Jobs made. At NeXT he put a GUI on Unix that worked, an idea that the Linux crowd is still working on. He listened to what people had been saying for years about boring beige boxes, and now consumers have other options from most manufacturers, even if not as far off the beige box path as the iMac was. Apple didn't have the resounding success with the cube that they had hoped, but computer case manufacturers are now starting to come out with smaller footprint machines that look awfully familiar (if opaque). Leonardo never got one of his machines to fly. Tesla didn't have the commercial success that Edison did, even though he was right where Edison was wrong. (How many of you have a DC outlet on your walls? Anyone?) Steve Jobs does more good with his often naively idealistic ventures than Bill Gates has, despite all those votes in Bill's bank accounts. Jobs is an extraordinarily successful designer who has shaped the way the computer world looks and works. Like many other designers, having that kind of life's work behind him drives him the way little green slips of paper drive lesser men.
MS is putting themselves in a very bad light with the disabled community if their site is denying access to text-based browsers. Screen readers already have had a tough time, just based on the page layout. Now they've gone and specifically denied any service to the tools many individuals with visual impairments use to stay connected to the world. Not a large community, necessarily, but still neglectful, particularly considering the advertising they do about the accessibility features of their products. Not a very smart move.
This could be more important than you think
on
NYSE Goes To Linux
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· Score: 1
One of the primary adopters of NeXT, back when it was still being seen as a possible desktop contender, were financial service professionals in New York. These people rely on security, and were/are willing to spend whatever money it takes to develop programs to analyze the incredible amounts of data they use in their decision making process. They regularly commission custom programming based on whatever algorithm they think best models the economy this month. The reason this could have more impact now than it did 12 years ago with NeXT is that not all of the action is in New York any more. Seeding Linux in this industry in the Big Apple now has the possibility of trickling down to the local Financial Consultant in rural Idaho who's just looking for a turn-key system that will let him in on the action. New York players will understand the value of the security and software development tools and will be willing to fund the programming. Middle America players will then buy in to the reputation and appreciate the price.
A lot of the responses here seem to suggest that you could give them a foundational level of computer expertise in this short period of time. I don't think you can count on having a class full of geek wannabees. Most people (including kids) don't need to become programmers or hackers. They just need to learn that computers aren't scary, and that with a little time and effort up front, there are a lot of things they can help you do.
If you were to limit your scope to something like having each child design a web page over the course of the summer, you would probably be doing them more good than explaining how the bowels of a computer work. Show them that computers are machines that can help them express themselves creatively, rather than just a new spin on tv or a way to play video games. They've probably had plenty of exposure at that level already. During the course you could introduce them to a graphics package and a simple web composer. Figure out how much time you have to introduce other software like an animation package, or show them how initial text editing may be easier in a word processor/text editor. But have it all relate back to the idea of putting together the web page. Put the focus on creating rather than just consuming. Some students may become engaged in coming up with stories or personal histories for their pages, while others may become exited about expressing themselves artistically through computer graphics. Some may even want to explore animation or HTML, you never know. This way, though, each can find a meaningful hook in the class and will have something personally meaningful to show for their efforts at the end of the summer.
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that I haven't seen addressed. What are the ramifications of downloading an episode of a TV series that has already been broadcast. I've paid my cable bill and would therefore, I think, have the right to view the program. If my VCR timer fritzes and I want to pick up a copy of an episode of Lost or 24, what are the legalities? Would it matter whether the commercials were included (which I would edit out regardless of whether I recorded it or someone else did)?
how many of those e-mail are truly spam (i.e. - blanket unsolicited e-mails) versus how many are "solicited" on Mr. Gates' behalf by others trying to avoid user identification (or just trying to make his life less convenient.) I wouldn't really qualify the latter as spam.
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html
This option makes a lot more sense to me. No likelihood of glowing children, and, despite the suggestion of flooding the dessert, could be easily decentralized around the country to make it harder to take out by terrorists.
I do wonder how making the middle east irrelevant would affect world politics. Think it would be a good idea to do BEFORE their nuclear weapons programs come to full fruition.
Getting people to buy e-book readers when there are only a limited number of titles seems to be one of the most frequently memtioned stumbling blocks. From a corporate perspective, I think e-TEXTBOOKS might be the best way to create this market.
Students:
1) are usually more willing to try new technology,
2) have better eyes and are less likely to complain while current graphics capabilities improve (how many times did your Mom insist you needed more light to read by when you were perfectly comfortable),
3) are in a sufficiently controlled environment that the DRM issues could be addressed, and
4) frequently need texts which are in the public domain (at least English and History students.)
Once the paradigm becomes familiar to a significant market segment, it will naturally expand to other areas of the literary economy.
My car not starting after a red light because it's too busy flirting with the Mazda in the next lane.
Back when I was working for a regional stock brokerage in Atlanta in the early- to mid-90's, I always recommended the various popular computer magazines to the brokers as a leading indicator of the news that would be making its way into the mainstream press within the next month. At that point just about any positive widely released press coverage would cause a jump in a tech stock. It was interesting to watch the progression of "news" stories about technologies and firms as they went from press release to periodical to general news outlet, and how they would affect stock prices (in the short term). We got pretty good at figuring out which articles had the pizzazz to make the transition. Some of the brokers made a good bit of money at a time when fundamentals weren't particularly good predictors just based on this news life-cycle.
Picking through the chicken little ranting, there was one little gem.
To paraphrase: the protectionist act of preventing foreign technology workers from coming to the US has led to the distribution of technical knowledge throughout the world to a much greater extent than would have occurred if emigration had been allowed/encouraged.
That concept deserves a lot more investigation. Whether it would have been better or worse, I wouldn't say without a lot more consideration. Redistributing wealth is a natural side effect of the advancement of any scale of economy, be it local, national or global. The lesson, though, seems to be that fighting the economics of the situation wound up creating exactly the result most feared; lost American jobs and capital.
What about essential professional apps that aren't office productivity related? I'll use Architecture as an example, since I am most familiar with it. But I'm sure there are many other professional level applications that could serve equally well in this context.
Apparently it's going to be a good while before any of the standard CAD programs are ported to Linux. I know that CGI shops use custom programs for rendering and modeling on vast farms of Linux machines, so Linux must be up to the challenge.
Architects and engineers have to be able to send files around to collaborators at other firms, who must then be able to manipulate the original files (add plumbing systems to buildings, etc.) So compatibility with the software being run on Windows systems(and to a lesser extent Macs) is essential. Furthermore, in my experience the learning curve to gain proficiency in one of the major design tools is particularly steep relative to other programs, so re-training reasonably highly-paid users is an expesive proposition, which makes being able to run well-known, industry- standard programs is even more important.
Is there a critical mass of users needed to encourage the consideration of particular software by those of you writing emulators? Is there even awareness of the potential market for such products? (These are users who regularly spend $2,000 - $5,000 per seat for the priviledge of running specific programs, if that helps the financial end of the argument. They'll pay for software.) Do the intense video requirements of these programs just make them more difficult to run in emulation? Do firms like Autodesk and Graphisoft (who are particularly paranoid about piracy, due to the "high-margin/low-volume" nature of the market for professional CAD software) go out of their way to discourage interoperability? Is there something I'm missing?
I sometimes get the U.S. Constitution mixed up with the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition myself.
When I'm having this difficulty, I find it helpfule to ask myself, "What would Quark do?"
Sincerely,
Someone who remembers when there was a company called SCO whose business model included developing useful products
The idea that consumers are clamoring for HDTV seems fallacious. I've seen it, and agree that it's a better picture, etc. I've heard symphony orchestras in great concert halls, and they sound better than any recording possibly could. You know what, though? I still enjoy listening to classical music in the car with the windows rolled down on the stock speakers in my car. It would never occur to me not to listen to the music in an acceptable format just because I know that somewhere, someone was having a higher fidelity experience. I'd get much more pleasure out of season symphony tickets for my wife and myself than spending the same amount on my home stereo or television.
Why is it necessary to mandate a format change? (I'm going to make up a term here, so credit me if you use it.) It's "push-through" economics. The basic premise is, "The invisible hand must be wrong since it's not leading the people where I want them to go. I must cut that hand off at the wrist, and strong arm the people back on the path I prefer."
I've been working at a center for assistive technology for about 2 years now, and one of the things that caught me off guard was that people with visual disabilities who use screen readers speed them up, frequently from 4x to 6x the speed of normal speech. It can sound a little like insects buzzing, depending on your setup.
It was startling because they usually demonstrate the technology at about 1x to people who won't be using it regularly. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense, I had just never thought about it. It was one of the things I'd always dreaded about sight-loss: how limiting it would be to have to access information at speech speed rather than reading speed.
What the RIAA wants more than anything is for 12-year-olds to get the message the they are breaking the law and that someone could come down on them hard. This is exactly the kind of case that they hope to push to the forefront of the issue. They're not interested in a 12-year-old girl who's very sorry and didn't realize that what she was doing was illegal. They're interested in 5 million other 12-year-old girls being too scared to download music in the first place because they've heard the stories of the girl whose parents had to send their entire life savings to record executives because she downloaded a couple of tracks and then Christmas didn't come to her house ever again and nobody got to go to college and there was no milk for the baby and the girl was sent away to juvenile hall where she was made to do her homework and clean enormous bathrooms 16 hours every day . . .
I use Evolution for e-mail in Linux and Opera for browsing. (I use Opera for both under W2K.) Haven't had a major problem with either in quite some time. Haven't tried the opera mail client under Linux. They've only added it recently, and to be honest, I'm happy enough with Evolution I haven't really been tempted to cheat on it.
Remember all those years when the big boys were all saying "linux will never be a serious operating system"?
Couldn't Linus just say "Yep, you were all right. The whole thing was a joke. Linux was always intended to be a comical OS."
At that point I think we could claim the whole system falls under the category of parody, and the copyright issues should just go away. Right?
Am I the only one who thinks that congress has a lot of more important issues they should be spending their time on than legislation revolving around entertainment. There are an awful lot of health and human dignity areas that would benefit from the time and money we're wasting on deciding whether a studio is being adequately compensated for a digitally perfect copy of a third rate movie.
Do we really need there to be more of an incentive for Americans to sit at home on their butts watching tv?
I just can't help but think the time, money and passion getting tied up in all of this could be better spent elsewhere.
What I don't understand is how corporations are allowed to give so much soft money TO BOTH SIDES!?!
It's pretty obvious that they aren't trying to further a political agenda (which I could see arguments for and against.) They're just making sure that whoever wins owes them a favor. They aren't making any pretense that their donations are anything more than bribery. I don't see where this would even be a grey area in the whole campaign finance reform issue.
Ximian Desktop only just came out for Mandrake 8.1 today . . . about 3 months after originally promised.
I know my father eventually got fed up with trying to keep up with all the upgrade cycles and just decided to get a stable system that he understood thoroughly that did what he needed (medical database programming) and stop worrying about upgrading. I think it was an SCO Unix (pre-Open Desktop) on a 486-66 with a half a gig of HD space and maybe 64MB memory. He always seemed to have a look of contentment on his face after that. I'm beginning to think that was a sign of maturity and sanity, rather than senility.
Trying to be a cutting-edge contrarian without really understanding the issues, and so looks foolish: a look he's apparently comfortable with.
Steve Jobs is actually cutting edge and, when appropriate, contrarian, and so has been having an effect on the computer world for twenty years, just not the effect Katz seems to value. How much of what he has done has filtered down into the computing mainstream. Ignoring the most obvious older examples, the popularization of the desktop metaphor, the introduction of the mouse, how many other design advances has Jobs made. At NeXT he put a GUI on Unix that worked, an idea that the Linux crowd is still working on. He listened to what people had been saying for years about boring beige boxes, and now consumers have other options from most manufacturers, even if not as far off the beige box path as the iMac was. Apple didn't have the resounding success with the cube that they had hoped, but computer case manufacturers are now starting to come out with smaller footprint machines that look awfully familiar (if opaque). Leonardo never got one of his machines to fly. Tesla didn't have the commercial success that Edison did, even though he was right where Edison was wrong. (How many of you have a DC outlet on your walls? Anyone?) Steve Jobs does more good with his often naively idealistic ventures than Bill Gates has, despite all those votes in Bill's bank accounts. Jobs is an extraordinarily successful designer who has shaped the way the computer world looks and works. Like many other designers, having that kind of life's work behind him drives him the way little green slips of paper drive lesser men.
MS is putting themselves in a very bad light with the disabled community if their site is denying access to text-based browsers. Screen readers already have had a tough time, just based on the page layout. Now they've gone and specifically denied any service to the tools many individuals with visual impairments use to stay connected to the world. Not a large community, necessarily, but still neglectful, particularly considering the advertising they do about the accessibility features of their products. Not a very smart move.
One of the primary adopters of NeXT, back when it was still being seen as a possible desktop contender, were financial service professionals in New York. These people rely on security, and were/are willing to spend whatever money it takes to develop programs to analyze the incredible amounts of data they use in their decision making process. They regularly commission custom programming based on whatever algorithm they think best models the economy this month. The reason this could have more impact now than it did 12 years ago with NeXT is that not all of the action is in New York any more. Seeding Linux in this industry in the Big Apple now has the possibility of trickling down to the local Financial Consultant in rural Idaho who's just looking for a turn-key system that will let him in on the action. New York players will understand the value of the security and software development tools and will be willing to fund the programming. Middle America players will then buy in to the reputation and appreciate the price.
If you were to limit your scope to something like having each child design a web page over the course of the summer, you would probably be doing them more good than explaining how the bowels of a computer work. Show them that computers are machines that can help them express themselves creatively, rather than just a new spin on tv or a way to play video games. They've probably had plenty of exposure at that level already. During the course you could introduce them to a graphics package and a simple web composer. Figure out how much time you have to introduce other software like an animation package, or show them how initial text editing may be easier in a word processor/text editor. But have it all relate back to the idea of putting together the web page. Put the focus on creating rather than just consuming. Some students may become engaged in coming up with stories or personal histories for their pages, while others may become exited about expressing themselves artistically through computer graphics. Some may even want to explore animation or HTML, you never know. This way, though, each can find a meaningful hook in the class and will have something personally meaningful to show for their efforts at the end of the summer.